What is a SOC framework and why does it need to evolve?
A security operations center (SOC) framework defines how an organization detects, investigates, and responds to threats. A SOC framework isn’t just a policy doc. It’s the people, processes, and technologies that keep threats in check—now redesigned for cloud speed and scale.
The traditional SOC was built for on-prem infrastructure, static networks, and predictable threats. In today’s cloud-native world—where workloads are ephemeral, environments are decentralized, and attack paths span misconfigurations and identities—SOC frameworks need to evolve.
Cloud-native SOCs require continuous visibility, intelligent triage, and automated response grounded in context, not just signal volume. All of this helps organizations achieve coverage and performance across distributed environments, secure ephemeral resources, and curb the plague of crowd sprawl. It also makes the tangle of shared responsibility models easier to navigate.
Most mature SOC frameworks align to well-known standards like NIST CSF, MITRE ATT&CK, or the SOC-CMM (Security Operations Center Maturity Model). While these standards provide foundational best practices, modern cloud SOCs need to extend them with cloud-specific runtime detection, exploit signal correlation, and shared-responsibility context.
With a strong SOC framework that’s purpose-built for the cloud, businesses can avoid fragmented signals and alert fatigue, both common byproducts of tool siloes. If executed well, cloud-native SOC frameworks greatly improve all aspects of threat detection, incident response, and cloud forensics, delivering strong protections and performance in the cloud at scale.
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Core components of a traditional SOC framework
To design and deploy a SOC framework that works in the cloud era, you need to first understand its basic structure; this comes down to people, processes, and technologies.
People
SOCs depend on highly skilled teams to effectively scan IT environments, discover and triage threats, and remediate them. What kind of roles and responsibilities does a cloud SOC need? Let’s break this down into three tiers:
Tier 1 SOC analysts monitor threats and alerts, triage and escalate incidents, and report findings.
Tier 2 SOC analysts or incident responders oversee the entire incident response lifecycle for high-severity events, from initial assessments to complete remediation.
Tier 3 SOC analysts or threat hunters mitigate the most critical threats and cloud incidents; they focus on continuously and proactively identifying and defending against known and unknown threats.
Processes
Here’s a look at some of the most important processes a SOC is responsible for:
Detection: Modern detection processes often align to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, helping SOC teams cover known cloud TTPs (tactics, techniques, and procedures) while hunting for novel threats.
Triage: Prioritizing discovered threats in order of severity and criticality; in other words, figuring out which threats may have the biggest impact on the organization
Escalation: Routing critical threats to the right teams and stakeholders to ensure that necessary remediation and reporting actions are swiftly completed
Containment: Ensuring that infected or compromised IT systems or resources are cordoned off to prevent lateral movement and damage
Eradication: Mitigating security threats with remediation strategies that may include right-sizing permissions, re-configuring resources, or patching outdated software
Recovery: Undoing whatever damage the threat or incident has caused to enterprise IT environments and bringing systems and operations back to established baselines
Technologies
To conduct the above processes, SOC teams rely on a diverse selection of tools and technologies:
Security information and event management (SIEM): Gathers, aggregates, and studies security event log data to support security teams in discovering and mitigating serious issues
Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR): Connects and orchestrates an enterprise’s entire security stack, from threat intelligence streams to monitoring tools, to ensure a cohesive and unified approach to incident response
Cloud Detection and Response (CDR): Provides real-time threat detection for cloud workloads, containers, and serverless environments. CDR solutions combine runtime telemetry, process-level visibility, and exploit detection to stop active threats like malware, crypto miners, or lateral movement within cloud infrastructure.
Threat intel feeds: Provides a constant stream of up-to-date threat data to help SOCs continuously sharpen security capabilities and look out for new and unknown threats
How the cloud changes SOC framework requirements
People, processes, and technologies are what make SOCs effective. But the radical evolution of cloud technologies has revealed a few critical limitations that slow down MTTD and MTTR, two of the most critical SOC metrics.
Here’s a summary of these limitations, along with brief descriptions:
Runtime visibility issues: Runtime blind spots are a major issue in the cloud, making it difficult to mitigate risks like file integrity changes, image drift, and log tampering.
Alert overload: The cloud presents hundreds of security issues daily, but not all are important. SOCs are often bogged down by unnecessary and low-risk security alerts; these frequently lack business, workload, and cloud contexts.
Misconfigurations: In cloud environments where everything is in flux all the time, it’s not easy to track the settings on each resource. As a result, without SOCs knowing, threat actors use misconfigured resources (e.g., excessive permissions and unrestricted inbound/outbound ports) as an attack vector.
Identity and access management (IAM) complexity: Managed privileges and entitlements in expanding and decentralized cloud estates often make it tough to map who has access to what resources.
Cloud sprawl: Identities, workloads, and resources multiply by the minute in the cloud. Over time, proper management of these rapidly mushrooming resources becomes virtually impossible, leading to blind spots and hidden security vulnerabilities.
Agent limitations: Traditional heavy agents on every workload can create blind spots and overhead. A modern cloud SOC benefits from lightweight, cloud-native sensors that run close to runtime, delivering the detection depth agents once did — but with modern scale and flexibility.
Remember: Detection alone isn't enough when it comes to the cloud. Your SOC team needs to understand which risks are exploitable and which could have the greatest impact on critical resources.
This is where context is king, and yet Gartner reports that 57% of security leaders are not satisfied with their SOC’s correlation capabilities. To achieve proper context and correlation at scale, your SOC frameworks must evolve to handle unique cloud-native threats and challenges.
Key functions of a cloud-ready SOC framework
To set up a comprehensive and cloud-ready SOC framework, make sure it has the following features and abilities:
Asset discovery and inventory: To identify, inventory, and map every single asset across ever-changing multi-cloud environments
Threat detection: To discover vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, exposures, and attacks across infrastructure, identities, workloads, and data pillars
Alert enrichment and prioritization: To triage threats and incidents based on business, cloud, and workload contexts, which means focusing on risks that might compromise mission-critical processes and crown jewel data
Investigation: To uncover the root cause of critical incidents by reconstructing the timeline of events and analyzing event data
Automated response: To block attacks from spreading, isolate compromised systems, and remediate incidents without excessive manual intervention
Post-incident analysis and learning: To generate usable data for improving SOC capabilities and your overall cloud security program
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Quick SOC Cloud-Readiness Checklist
Ask your team:
Do we have unified signal ingestion? Are we collecting cloud logs, flow logs, runtime process telemetry, and identity context – all in one place, without juggling multiple tools?
Do we detect active exploit attempts in real time? Can we see process injection, reverse shells, and other runtime attacks that evade static scans?
Is detection contextualized? Do we correlate misconfigurations, IAM risks, and workload exposure to spot real exploit paths?
Can we trace attack paths? Do we map how a runtime event connects to upstream misconfigurations, permissions, and crown jewel data exposure?
Do we auto-deduplicate noisy alerts? Are we using AI or correlation logic to cut false positives and alert fatigue?
Is our response automated and guided? Do we have prebuilt investigation timelines, enrichment, and easy integration with SOAR or SIEM workflows?
Can we hunt proactively? Do we have an always-on graph that lets analysts run ad hoc queries across cloud assets, identities, and threats?
Is our detection mapped to frameworks like MITRE ATT&CK? Are we covering known TTPs for cloud-specific threat techniques?
Wiz’s philosophy: Modern SOC enablement via Wiz Defend
You need a purpose-built, cloud-native platform to modernize your SOC and keep pace with today’s threats
Wiz Defend brings together all aspects of cloud detection and response, including threat identification, triage, and remediation, into a unified platform. Wiz Defend pairs agentless cloud scanning with a cloud-native runtime sensor, so your SOC gets deep exploit detection without relying on intrusive legacy agents.
Here are some of Wiz Defend’s most important capabilities to reinforce your SOC, make it cloud-ready, and support SOC best practices:
Unified signal ingestion: Combines cloud logs, flows, and runtime telemetry using lightweight sensors — giving your SOC deep detection coverage without legacy agent sprawl.
Context-rich cloud detection and response: Enriches every alert with misconfigurations, identity risk, network exposure, and workload context so that teams can focus on what’s exploitable
AI-assisted prioritization: Intelligently eliminates duplicates and orders alerts according to threat level and organizational relevance
Integrated response: Provides prebuilt investigation views, visual timelines, and SOAR integrations that enable rapid containment and recovery
Proactive threat hunting: Enables security teams to query across all cloud assets using the Wiz Security Graph without any stitching
With Wiz’s Defend’s powerful features, you can turn your SOC into a cloud security powerhouse.
Interested in trying out Wiz in your cloud environments? Get a demo today.
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